Past to Present: Reflections from an Artist Turned Environmentalist
By Dana Sharp
Edited by Alexandra Pálóczi and Shayan Shokrgozar
From ancient cave paintings to modern masterpieces, art continues to color the world. Yet, beneath beauty lies the hidden environmental costs each art piece extracts on nature. This piece reflects on an artist’s personal journey coming to realize these environmental costs
Ancient Artwork
Art has been around for millennia. Songs, dance, paintings, carvings, poetry… unique disciplines as diverse as the themes and imagery conjured. Rising from humble origins and natural materials, the early Paleolithic cave paintings of Lascaux Cave and the petroglyph rock carvings found across the American southwest continue weathering the elements of time, illustrating how art spans cultural, temporal, and physical distances.
Dating from 17,000–15,000 BCE, hundreds of paintings depicting aurochs, bison, ibex, humans, and other wildlife marvel researchers and visitors alike (Groeneveld 2016). Lascaux is one of several ornately decorated caves within Europe’s Dordogne region. Black from charcoal and manganese oxides, yellow iron oxyhydroxides, and red ochre dominate the cave’s color pallet. Heating, grinding, and mixing made the mineral pigments wall-ready for finger painting, paintbrush, or blowing color through hollow bones onto the rocky surface. Though the true purpose remains unknown, researchers believe the cave art was for ritual or spiritual activity (Groenveld 2016). Today Lascaux offers a glimpse into Paleolithic realities and preserves some of the earliest natural paint.
Across the sea, the ancient Anasazi peoples of Chaco Canyon, in present-day New Mexico, USA made rock etchings known as petroglyphs. Researchers found designs depicting real astrological anomalies, such as a 1054 AD supernova, Halley’s comet seen in 1066 AD, and a total solar eclipse from 1097 AD (UC Boulder 2017). Besides documenting and interpreting the sky, the petroglyph, Piedra del Sol, marks the countdown to the summer solstice, while other carvings represent cultural phenomena (UC Boulder 2017).
Whether consisting of clay, stone, bone, metal, cloth, or wood, much of what prehistoric craftspeople made still exists today. If natural materials have stood the test of time, what does this mean for today’s synthetic ones? How does modern art impact the environment? As an artist and environmentalist, I reflect on my own journey coming to terms with this connection.
From Crayons to Canvases
From the moment I could hold a crayon I began drawing. Winning coloring contests, making popsicle stick crafts, filling my school notes with doodles as time went past. Moving across the country for middle school, I felt shy, friendless, and ultimately blue. Fortunately, art class kept me sane, and my grandparents gave me my first canvases to train. With time, acrylic paints began piling high, filling canvases with color and life. Not only did the canvas come alive, but so did the young girl feeling sad inside.
High school brought art shows, stagecraft, and a national prize — igniting a passion to rise. Then came glassblowing, pottery, photography, jewelry making, and some metalwork creating. Yet, as time went by, I began to realize… Making art isn’t always as glamorous as one imagines. No, I’m not referring to the countless times I’ve nearly drank dirty paint water, or when prioritizing art led to me almost failing algebra and chemistry my first semester of university. I’m talking about how crafting doesn’t come without environmental harm.
Crafting Awareness
Mining metals, firing kilns, transforming trees into paper, cultivating cotton canvases. I shudder at the recollection of hearing an artist discuss using rabbit-skin glue as gesso for oil painting. Is a painting really worth boiling a rabbit? Whatever the outcome, every artistic process requires manpower and environmental inputs.
Made by burning wood in low oxygen conditions, charcoal is one of the earliest drawing mediums. Today willow, vine, and compressed charcoal remain popular amongst artists. Yet, making charcoal requires cutting trees or taking sticks to burn (Dalziel 2016), releasing CO, CO2, and other harmful gases (Sparrevik et al. 2015). Besides the natural materials of the past, contemporary artists now access a wide range of synthetic materials too. For me, learning oil and natural gas derive acrylic paints, replaces pleasure with plastic — something I despise. When my old paint disappears like the dinosaurs it’s made from, I’ll go back to natural pigments. In the meantime, I’m diverting the dirty paint from my drain, and keeping it contained to properly send away.
During university, I saw the film, Wasteland, about artist Vik Muniz’s journey to Brazil’s largest landfill, Jardim Gramacho. Muniz eagerly meets waste pickers, learning about their work, lives, and recycling pride. Manipulating rubbish from the site, Muniz creates large portraits of the workers for his series, Pictures of Garbage (Muniz 2010). Unlike Muniz’s series, most art is made from new materials. Surely, the sum of all paint tubes, palettes, paintbrushes, palette knives, and every other art supply thrown out each year would form a small landfill in and of itself. Taking this to heart, I began to start saving my own ‘trash’ to upcycle into art.
Art for the Future
Hiding the harm, artists go quietly along, most unaware or unwilling to share the true environmental costs. Metalworking all day, I even felt blown away learning 20 tons of earth is mined to create a single golden ring (Stretesky 2014).
Art’s colorful spectrum records dreams, life, time, and change. Unbeknownst to most, art shapes landscapes not just through design, but through acquiring the raw materials to come alive. From ancient pieces detailing rituals to works depicting contemporary challenges, all art requires energy. Yet, art also brings energy — reviving hope, communicating complex issues, and touching the heart and the brain (Song 2009).
Just as ancient relics remain, contemporary contributions will continue coloring the planet. Fortunately, artists can choose to color their practices green. Upcycling old materials, using natural pigments, properly disposing of waste, and even restoring disrupted ecosystems through trans-species art (Song 2009). Perhaps art will weave a beautiful, inclusive, and sustainable future for all.
Bio:
Dana Sharp is an American graduate student living in Oslo, Norway. Her passions are art, education, and sustainability. Over the years she’s been in several art shows and won numerous awards for her work. When she’s not writing her thesis, she enjoys hiking, photographing nature, and doodling. Following graduating, she’s looking forward to reuniting with her art supplies and finishing a series of paintings to raise awareness towards endangered species and plastic pollution.
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